


His Legacy

by VYCanisMajoris



Category: Iron Man - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Bittersweet Ending, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, I'm so sorry, M/M, POV Bucky Barnes, Seriously ya'll, Violence, angst fest, so much
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-24
Updated: 2017-03-24
Packaged: 2018-10-09 21:39:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10422327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VYCanisMajoris/pseuds/VYCanisMajoris
Summary: For Tumblr Prompt:Sad af winteriron with thought-dead or dead-dead Tony? Happy or sad ending is up to you if you choose to write it. Thanks love :)





	

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I don't own any of these characters. They belong to Marvel Entertainment. Any writing is completely fan-made and I make no profit from this writing.

“Barnes.”

His pants will get dirty, Bucky realizes, if he stays on the ground. How did he get here? He was just standing watching the building crumble apart as black smoke flew high into the air, but now he’s kneeling in a pile of rubble, flesh hand burning with hundreds of tiny cuts covered in a layer of dust, prosthetic hand scratched beyond compare from the rocks he clenches in his hands.

“Barnes.” A hand shakes his shoulder, and Bucky looks up, vision swimming. Sam is crouched beside him, eyes wide and red as he says, “We need to go, Barnes. You need to get to medical.” 

Bucky tries to speak, but coughs instead, throat jammed with dust. He rasps out, “No. Not without him.” 

“Barnes, we need to go,” Sam turns Bucky away from the rubble, from the remains of the building broken around them, the building that broke over Tony, crushing him into the ground in less than a second. 

The battle wasn’t a battle. The team received the call about a squad of hydra’s workers moving through the city, and they responded to the call. It was easy, much to easy, to deal with the men. He should have realized it then, that something was up, but he didn’t. They received more information from Jarvis about a building, something suspicious that Bucky can’t remember. Tony went in, looking for – looking for something, lost connection to the team, and didn’t come back out. Not _yet_. 

“Buck.” Steve’s beside them now, kneeling next to Sam. “You need to get to medical.” 

“No,” Bucky shakes his head slowly, “No, T-Tony’s… Tony’s stuck. We need to get him.” 

“We can’t,” Steve’s voice cracks as he says this, and Bucky frowns at him, confused. 

“He’s in there,” Bucky points at the broken walls and crumbled foundation. “Tony’s in there. We _need_ to get him. Let me _get him_.”

“Buck,” Steve takes his metal arm while Sam takes his flesh. They pull him up to his feet, and he lets them. He doesn’t have the strength to struggle, and he doesn’t understand why they’re moving him when they _need_ to get Tony before anything happens to him. “You need to go to medical.”

“Tony isn’t-”

“We’ll look for Tony,” Sam interrupts him, gripping his arm tight as he and Steve pull Bucky along. “We’ll look for him while you go to medical. You know that he would bitch at you if you stayed out while you were hurt.” 

“M’not hurt.” 

“Buck,” Steve steers them to the ambulance, where the rest of the team waits, faces pale and eyes red. “You’ve got a piece of metal sticking out of your side.” 

Bucky frowns at him, and looks down at himself. His uniform is caked with dark brown dirt, dusted with bits of rubble, and… Bucky squints. A sharp piece of metal, from what he doesn’t know, is piercing his right side, staining the cloth with bright red blood, a stark contrast to the surrounding grey.  

“Oh,” Bucky nods slowly, vision speckled with black, “He won’t be happy bout this.” 

Steve and Sam share a look Bucky doesn’t notice, one that he won’t understand until later. 

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Rhodes visits him after the rest of the team was unwillingly redirected into separate rooms by the nurses. 

Bucky’s pain medication has worn off. The sharp pain in his side returned hours ago, but he refused to have anymore, even though Steve tried to get him to accept it.   
He doesn’t want his head to be foggy anymore. He doesn’t want to forget anything. He can’t let himself forget Tony’s face before they left, the smile in his eyes as he made another sarcastic comment about Bucky’s taste in movies but sweetened the “pain” with a kiss. 

He can’t let himself forget how he failed Tony. 

Rhodes pulls a chair over to the edge of the cot, and sits beside him. He leans back in his chair, arms crossed, and stares at Bucky’s arm. The prosthetic is marred with deep scratches that will take hours to buff out, even longer since he’ll do it by himself.

Bucky went… Clint said he went crazy, when the building collapsed, and stayed crazy for hours. He tried to dig through the entire building, breaking and throwing pieces of the rubble along with the Hulk, but he didn’t stop like the Hulk did when Betty came out to calm him down. 

Bucky doesn’t remember doing that, though he must have, since his flesh hand is mottled dark purples and greens that make movement tough and painful. 

“I…” Rhodey rubs his face with one shaking hand, eyes red like Bucky’s, and says, “I thought I should be here, with you. I know it felt when, after… I-I didn’t want to be alone then, either.” 

“But you found him,” Bucky says slowly, voice hoarse and breaking, “You found him.” 

Rhodey doesn’t reply. He just gives a small nod, eyes watery, and looks away. Bucky watches him, vision blurring, and reaches out to take Rhodey’s hand. Rhodey takes it, and grips the metal tightly.  

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bucky walks down the path, steps slow and dragging next to Pepper and Natalia’s quick, efficient strides. They’ve insisted on taking him out of the building walks several times per week. “For actual air,” Natalia told him, eyes pleading as she glanced over to Pepper, who hasn’t spoken much since Tony…

Pepper refused to stop working. If anything, she threw herself further into her work, making sure Tony’s… his legacy, is what the media is calling it, lives on. She hasn’t taken many breaks, only stopping to eat and sleep. 

Natasha holds his metal hand in one of hers, and Pepper’s in the other. She drags them along with her, talking about how Steve really needs to stop pining over Sam and actually make a move. 

Bucky behind her back to Pepper, who meets his gaze. She stares at him for several long moments, eyes flickering, before offering up a shaky smile. Bucky returns it as best he can.   
She lost a friend too, Bucky knows. A friend she thought she’d have for life, like how he thought he’d have Tony for life. 

\-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The stone is simple, but, true to Tony’s personality, a line of coding is engraved onto it instead of his name and date of birth, along with a smartass comment stating, “I told you I was sick.” 

The grave is in the shade of an apple tree, placed next to Tony’s mother’s. That’s where he wanted it, Bucky knows, since Tony told him once after a battle they barely made it back from. He wanted to be with his mom again. 

Bucky stares at the gravestone, sitting in front of it, legs crossed. He was supposed to come here for _closure_ , as his therapist called it, but he doesn’t think he’ll ever get closure from this. 

“I’m sorry,” Bucky finally croaks out after two hours of silence, “I’m sorry I couldn’t… I’m sorry I couldn’t _save_ you.” 

He sucks in a hard breath, reaching up to press the meat, and metal, of his palms into his eyes. Stars burst from the pressure, and he shakes his head slowly, trying to force down the feeling of utter wrongness, the empty hole in his chest eating him alive. 

“I’m sorry I couldn’t get to you. I’m sorry we didn’t get another date, I’m sorry you didn’t have the chance to one-up our fucking pick-up line competition… I’m… I’m _so sorry_ , sweetheart.” 

Bucky’s voice catches on a sob, and his grip on his face tightens to a painful degree. His eyes are burning when he pulls his hands back, and he isn’t alone anymore. He glances to his side, where Peter sits, hands in his lap and eyes red and watery as well.

Peter was at the funeral, Bucky remembers. He remembers Peter’s aunt accompanying him, them standing at the gravestone for several long moments, hand-in-hand. Peter took the loss hard, like Bucky, but had his aunt to keep him afloat.

The others tried with Bucky, but he’s a stubborn bastard when he thinks he deserves it. That’s what his therapist said, though she used less strong words.

“How much did you hear?” Bucky asks softly.

“Everything.” Peter says, fingers tapping on his thighs in a familiar rhythm. Bucky thinks for a moment. It’s the rhythm that Tony tapped against his reactor. “Enhanced senses, and all that.”

Bucky nods, he knows about Peter’s abilities, and Peter continues quickly, “I… Tony wouldn’t want you to be sorry.” 

“How do you know?”

Peter gives a small shrug, reaching up to wipe his tear-stained cheeks. “Tony always worried about you. He… he didn’t want you to be sad. When you were, he’d-he’d do his best to make you happy. Tony always thought you deserved the best, so he’d…” 

Peter laughs, a wet noise, “He’d ask us, J-Jarvis and I, where to take you for dates, what flowers to get you, if you’d think chocolate would be overkill. We always told him that you’d love whatever it was, you guys have been dating for years, but he…” He trails off, voice cracking. 

Bucky stares at Peter, hands clenched in his lap, heart racing. He knows Tony worried, he worried about Tony too, but hearing it like this, where they are, makes his heart break.   
He breaks the silence by saying, “He thought of you like a son.” 

That makes the tears around Peter’s eyes well up, and he covers his face, muffling his cries. Bucky reaches out, and pulls Peter into a hug as he stares at the tombstone, so _Tony_ that it’s hard to look away. 

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bucky watches with wide eyes as an Iron Man suit, scratched and rusted but still amazingly red, shoot through the sky. 

It isn’t Tony, he knows that. He watched them retrieve the small bits and pieces of the armor from the wreckage, so destroyed that the remains inside couldn’t be identified. The familiar image still fills him with an odd sense of hope, however, so Bucky follows the armor, silent and quick as he sprints down the alleyways. 

The rest of the team doesn’t know he’s here. They think he’s at his therapist’s, but she gave him the night off, saying that he should get fresh air and take in the sights and all that shit, her words this time, not his. 

The armor lands in a dark alleyway, next to a dumpster that Bucky knows for a fact Clint spent several hours in after a fight. The metal clanks, echoing through the alley, as the figure pulls the gauntlets off, placing them lightly onto the ground. They reach out, and pull the helmet off, revealing coiled hair and bright eyes that are so familiar they make the air rush from Bucky’s lungs. 

He collects himself, and steps forward, coming into the young woman’s line of sight. She’s young, he can see, looking to be about sixteen.  

She doesn’t move, however, choosing to narrow her eyes at Bucky, staring at him for several moments, before they widen with realization, and she takes a step back. “You’re Bucky Barnes.” 

He nods, and points to the armor, saying, “That doesn’t belong to you.” 

“I-I know,” she glances at it, then back to him quickly. “I didn’t steal it! I found it, and I… I repurposed it.” 

“There’s security in place for it,” Bucky steps forward, reaching out. She stares at his metal arm with unconcealed curiosity and wonder, the same as Tony does- _did_ , before placing the helmet in his hands. 

Bucky takes it, and turns it around to look at the face, smiling a small, sad smile.

“I know,” she says slowly, looking up from it to Bucky. “I disabled it, made it so it recognized me instead.” 

Bucky tilts his head, surprised, and asks, “You’re smart, aren’t you?”

“Going to MIT.” 

The smile fades. “You’re what, sixteen?”

“Fifteen,” she juts her chin out, challenging him to say something against her, but he doesn’t. Instead, he asks, “What’ve you been doing with this then? If you’re that smart, you’ll know that one of the team would find this, and find you.” 

“I know.”

“Then why?”

She pauses for a moment, thinking, before finally saying, “I didn’t plan on this, I just… I found it, one day. I didn’t think of making it to fight, or-or to sell it. I just…” she shrugs, tapping the arc reactor, “He made it to help, and I wasn’t going to let it rust, unfulfilled.”

Bucky stares at her, then smiles again, ignoring the way his eyes burn, and says, “Thank you, for that.”

He holds out his hand, “Winter Soldier, also called the Falcon’s sidekick though I’m a helluva lot better.” 

She stares at his hand for a moment, judging the pros and cons with lightning fast thoughts flickering in her eyes that scream _Tony_ , takes his hand, and says, “Riri Williams. Don’t have an alias yet.” 

Bucky scans her, taking in the intelligent eyes, her wary stance, and thinks over her replies. She hacked into the suit, one of Tony’s older models that would never fly without his gentle hand, and made it work again for _Tony_ , to carry on his work, his _legacy_.

He finds himself asking, “How about Iron Man?”

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you all enjoyed soul-crushing angst! I'd say that I'm sorry, but I was laughing and thinking, "I'm _such_ a bitch." as I was typing this all up! 
> 
> In all honesty, I've thought a lot about writing a sequel to this, something actually fluffy to fix this all up, but I was never sure if I really _should_.


End file.
